Simon works actively as a database architect and support troubleshooter, skills which drive and shape his contributions to the development of operational features for PostgreSQL. Feature credits include Point in Time Recovery, Warm Standby replication, Hot Standby, Asynchronous Commit, Partitioning and many other performance and tuning features. His designs and solutions can be found throughout the PostgreSQL code and documentation.
Simon has also previously worked with Oracle, Teradata, and DB2 and holds multiple certifications. His previous experience covers management and senior technical roles in the banking, telecommunications and software industries. Simon's early research work has been published by the Royal Society.
About the Reviewers
Gabriele Bartolini is a long time open-source programmer, writing Linux/Unix applications in C and C++ for over 10 years, specializing in search engines and web analytics with large databases.
Gabriele has a degree in Statistics from the University of Florence. His areas of expertise are data mining and data warehousing, having worked on web traffic analysis in Australia and Italy.
Gabriele is a consultant with 2ndQuadrant and an active member of the international PostgreSQL community.
Gabriele currently lives in Prato, a small but vibrant city located in the northern part of Tuscany, Italy. His second home is Melbourne, Australia, where he has studied at Monash University and worked in the ICT sector.
His hobbies include "calcio" (football or soccer, depending on which part of the world you come from) and playing his Fender Stratocaster electric guitar.
Thanks to my family, in particular Cathy who encourages me by saying there is always something new to learn.
Dimitri Fontaine is part of the PostgreSQL community and has been contributing to open source for more than 10 years. He is the lead developer of enterprise ready solutions such as pgloader (ETL), PostgreSQL prefix indexing (telephony routing),pg_staging (development environment maintenance from production backups), preprepare (allow easy usage of prepare statements behind a connection pooler), and some backports of recent PostgreSQL features
He also contributed to Skytools and the Londiste replication system and, authored a PHP layer for the PGQ event handler, allowing for robust asynchronous processing and code reuse.
Dimitri's passion is system architecture & design, with the goals of reduced maintenance time and very high availability
Professional experience, community involvement, and PostgreSQL expertise have led Dimitri to now work as a principal consultant at 2ndQuadrant, France.
Preface
PostgreSQL is an advanced SQL database server, available on a wide range of platforms and is fast becoming one of the world's most popular server databases with an enviable reputation for performance, stability, and an enormous range of advanced features. PostgreSQL is one of the oldest open source projects, completely free to use, and developed by a very diverse worldwide community. Most of all, it just works!
One of the clearest benefits of PostgreSQL is that it is open source, meaning that you have a very permissive license to install, use, and distribute PostgreSQL without paying anyone any fees or royalties. On top of that, PostgreSQL is well-known as a database that stays up for long periods, and requires little or no maintenance in many cases. Overall, PostgreSQL provides a very low total cost of ownership.
PostgreSQL Administration Cookbook offers the information you need to manage your live production databases on PostgreSQL. The book contains insights direct from the main author of the PostgreSQL replication and recovery features, and the database architect of the most successful startup using PostgreSQL, Skype. This hands-on guide will assist developers working on live databases, supporting web or enterprise software applications using Java, Python, Ruby, .Net from any development framework. It's easy to manage your database when you've got PostgreSQL 9 Administration Cookbook at hand.
This practical guide gives you quick answers to common questions and problems, building on the author's experience as trainers, users, and core developers of the PostgreSQL database server.
Each technical aspect is broken down into short recipes that demonstrate solutions with working code, and then explain why and how that works. The book is intended to be a desk reference for both new users and technical experts.
The book covers all the latest features available in PostgreSQL 9. Soon you will be running a smooth database with ease!
What this book covers
, First Steps , covers topics such as an introduction to PostgreSQL 9, downloading and installing PostgreSQL 9, connecting to a PostgreSQL server, enabling server access to network/remote users, using graphical administration tools, using psql query and scripting tools, changing your password securely, avoiding hardcoding your password, using a connection service file, and troubleshooting a failed connection.